As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, an increasing number of content, application, and/or service providers are turning to technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud computing, in general, is an approach to providing access to electronic resources through services, such as Web services, where the hardware and/or software used to support those services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time. A user or customer typically will rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources through the cloud, and thus does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software to provide access to these resources.
Various services have been developed that enable a customer to adjust the compute capacity for an application or service in the cloud over time, making Web-scale computing easier for developers. In some cases, a Web service interface is provided that enables a customer to manage computing capacity, such as to obtain or boot new server instances in order to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as computing requirements change.
The adjusting of capacity can be advantageous for applications available across a network or from a remote location. Oftentimes, these applications will rely on, or take advantage of, at least one data store or other such repository hosting data that is used by the respective application. While the processing capacity for the applications or services can be adjusted dynamically through these Web service interfaces, the data repositories upon which these applications rely are not similarly adjustable. Typically, performing tasks such as provisioning and scaling data storage are tedious manual procedures, in which a customer has to provide a database administrator (DBA) or similar expert user with configuration information and requirements, such that the DBA can determine whether the configuration is valid. The DBA typically then has to enable, tune, and optimize the data repository. There is no easy way for a customer to dynamically adjust the data storage capacity, or manage other such aspects of a data repository.